NTT Communication Science Laboratories, Nippon Telegraph and Telephone, Atsugi, Japan.
Department of Information Technology and Human Factors, National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST), Tsukuba, Japan.
Q J Exp Psychol (Hove). 2021 Apr;74(4):705-715. doi: 10.1177/1747021820972255. Epub 2020 Nov 29.
Sustained attention plays an important role in adaptive behaviours in everyday activities. As previous studies have mostly focused on vision, and attentional resources have been thought to be specific to sensory modalities, it is still unclear how mechanisms of attentional fluctuations overlap between visual and auditory modalities. To reduce the effects of sudden stimulus onsets, we developed a new gradual-onset continuous performance task (gradCPT) in the auditory domain and compared dynamic fluctuation of sustained attention in vision and audition. In the auditory gradCPT, participants were instructed to listen to a stream of narrations and judge the gender of each narration. In the visual gradCPT, they were asked to observe a stream of scenery images and indicate whether the scene was a city or mountain. Our within-individual comparison revealed that auditory and visual attention are similar in terms of the false alarm rate and dynamic properties including fluctuation frequency. Absolute timescales of the fluctuation in the two modalities were comparable, notwithstanding the difference in stimulus onset asynchrony. The results suggest that fluctuations of visual and auditory attention are underpinned by common principles and support models with a more central, modality-general controller.
持续注意力在日常活动的适应性行为中起着重要作用。由于之前的研究主要集中在视觉上，并且注意力资源被认为是特定于感觉模式的，因此，视觉和听觉模式之间的注意力波动机制如何重叠仍然不清楚。为了减少突然刺激出现的影响，我们在听觉领域开发了一种新的渐变连续绩效任务（gradCPT），并比较了视觉和听觉中持续注意力的动态波动。在听觉 gradCPT 中，要求参与者聆听叙述流并判断每个叙述的性别。在视觉 gradCPT 中，他们被要求观察风景图像流，并指出场景是城市还是山脉。我们的个体内比较表明，听觉和视觉注意力在虚报率和包括波动频率在内的动态特性方面是相似的。尽管刺激起始时间不同，但两种模式的波动的绝对时间尺度是可比的。结果表明，视觉和听觉注意力的波动是由共同的原则支持的，并支持具有更中央、模式通用控制器的模型。
